I have seen a sixteen-year-old boy weeping in distress after getting a girl’s pube stuck in his teeth, I hear he was unshaven. I have seen boys showing each other porn on their iPhones on the train home from school, in bars and whilst strolling along the Champs-Elyséés. I have had a boy ask me to text him screenshots of porn films because he was on a wifi-free family holiday. One boy turned to kiss his date in the cinema but not before romantically whispering ‘don’t struggle’. One friend drunkenly walked off into a park in the early hours of the morning and when a male friend brought her back without ‘trying anything’, he was heralded as being ‘soo nice!’ rather than ‘soo normal!’. I have friends whose boyfriends have posted naked pictures of them all over the Internet. I have heard consent described as ‘de-romanticizing’. I have had a shockingly sober boy say to me ‘Why can’t I just slap my dick on your arse? Doesn’t cost you anything!’. This just scratches the surface of my store of depressing anecdotes; the most violent of which I won’t go into out of respect for the girls involved.

2014 is not a good year to be a teenage girl. The last of the 90’s kids are growing up and we are starting to see the effects of being raised with the Internet. For generations before us, hormonal teenage boys looking for sexy images of women had limited options; they could brave the embarrassment of going to the counter and buying Playboy, they could look through their sister’s Cosmo or they could use their imagination. Porn today has rid itself of the embarrassment-factor by embracing the anonymity of the World Wide Web; Playboy isn’t really considered to be porn anymore, the real stuff lives in your phone, on your laptop, your tablet; it is available anywhere, anytime at the touch of a button. In fact this very website receives a steady stream of hits that result from someone googling some combination of ‘housekeeping porn’ + ‘sex’, ‘lesbian’ and/or ‘rape’. As you read this, somewhere there is an eleven-year-old boy curiously typing ‘porn’ into Google, probably hoping to see some big boobies. Fast forward a couple of years and he is masturbating to a video of a crying woman who is being tied down, simultaneously penetrated by three men, spanked, and being called a whore. Young boys are being de-sensitized to violence and the more they consume, the more abusive, the more graphic the porn has to be to excite them.

The most popular type of porn is called ‘Gonzo’ which is essentially wall-to-wall abusive sex. There is no foreplay or romance; it is literally hardcore sex from the first to the last frame. The sex is almost always violent; spanking, gagging, anal fisting and choking are commonplace. A very popular image is a close-up of the woman’s face with tears streaming down caused by her being choked whilst performing oral sex, directors like to make this obvious by making her wear lots of mascara; for dramatic effect. There is no way that this could not have a profound effect on the consumer’s psyche specifically on their attitude towards women. Most boys make no secret of the fact that they watch and enjoy such porn, watching it in groups in the presence of girls or brashly and explicitly describing their fantasies. Girls know boys watch porn and girls know what porn stars are; they are hairless, they have hourglass figures and they never say no. And so a massive amount of pressure is placed on girls to live up to this. Shaving pubic hair is painful and unsanitary (it leaves hundreds of minute cuts which increases the risk of STDs). And yet girls as young as 11 are doing it. The porn industry is the primary source of sex ed for the boys who will grow up to be the decision-makers, thinkers, writers, husbands and fathers of tomorrow. A brief overview of what they are being taught/brainwashed to believe;

That it is their birthright as males to have sex with whichever female they want when they want regardless of consent or age.

That the only way to have good sex and the only way to be masculine is to be aggressive, forceful and violent

That they must always be in control and always want to be in control

That their pleasure comes first and foremost

It hardly needs stating what kind of pressures and expectations this puts on girls and women. They have to be living breathing sex dolls and they have to love it. The porn industry is women abuse.

Serious stuff. I think it raises a far more complex debate than this opener suggests though. It starts with censorship and ends with role models, but in-between takes in the twin joys of sexual abuse and misogynistic ne’er do wells.

The internet contains instructions on how to make bombs and allows holocaust denialists to share a room with families of victims of both. It is a shameful, dirty, horrid, den of iniquity.

But.

It also brings families together, creates love and art and wonder. It brings news of wrongdoings to the worlds eyes when before atrocities could go by unseen by the ignorant populous.

Gonzo porn is rotten to the core, I agree. I gave my children ‘the talk’ when they were about 15 that what they saw on the internet did not always represent the whole truth. And that they should NEVER pressurise a partner into doing something they were uncomfortable with. Beyond that there is nothing much more a parent can equip their kids with in my opinion. Banning the internet is impractical and frankly would stop them from getting all that good stuff.

What we need now is for someone to make some intelligent porn. Any volunteers?